U.S. warned of Afghan prison abuse

KABUL – Across the street from U.S. military headquarters in Kabul, shrouded from view by concrete walls, the Afghan intelligence agency runs a detention facility for up to 40 terrorism suspects that is known as Department 124. So much torture took place inside, one detainee told the United Nations, that it has earned a different name: “people call it Hell.”

But long before the world body publicly revealed “systematic torture” in Afghan intelligence agency detention centers, top officials from the State Department, CIA and U.S. military received multiple warnings about abuses at Department 124 and other Afghan facilities, according to Afghan and Western officials with knowledge of the situation. Despite the warnings, the United States continued to transfer detainees to Afghan intelligence service custody, the officials said. Even as other countries stopped handing over detainees to problematic facilities, the American government did not.

U.S. Special Operations troops delivered detainees to Department 124 and CIA officials regularly visited the facility, which was rebuilt last year with American money to interrogate high-level Taliban and al-Qaida suspects, according to Afghan and Western officials familiar with the site. Afghan intelligence officials said Americans never participated in the torture but should have known about it.

When the United Nations brought allegations of widespread detainee abuse on Aug. 30 to Gen. John Allen, the top U.S. military commander here, he took swift action ahead of the public release of the findings. Coalition troops stopped transferring detainees to Department 124 and 15 other police and intelligence agency prisons. They also hastily began a program to monitor those facilities and conduct human rights classes for interrogators.

But the prospect that U.S. officials failed to act on prior warnings raises questions about their compliance with a law, known as the Leahy Amendment, that prohibits the U.S. from funding units of foreign security forces when there is credible evidence they have committed human rights abuses. The State Department is now investigating whether the law applies and what funding might be affected, according to U.S. officials.

American officials denied that they had ignored credible warnings of detainee abuse and said that whenever such an allegation was raised, they took action. Former top commander Gen. David Petraeus, for instance, ordered a halt to detainee transfers to Afghan intelligence and police custody in Kandahar in July.

“Any place that we’ve had a concern in the past, we’ve taken the appropriate steps, I’m confident of that, and we’re taking the appropriate steps now,” Lt. Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, the second-ranking U.S. commander in Afghanistan, said in an interview. “I don’t see it as a systemic problem, as some have said it might be.”

Even by the standards of Afghanistan’s deeply troubled justice system, Department 124 stood out. With chilling detail, the United Nations recounted detainees’ stories of interrogators hanging them by their hands for hours, beating them with metal pipes, shocking them with electricity and twisting their genitals until they passed out. Of the 28 detainees interviewed who had spent time at the facility, 26 told the U.N. they had been tortured, according to a report released this month. Before the U.N. investigation began in October 2010, the International Committee of the Red Cross told Afghan and U.S. officials about their concerns over detainee abuse at Department 124 and elsewhere, according to people briefed on the confidential discussions.

The conversations intensified earlier this year, with the ICRC warning top-level officials from the U.S. Embassy, CIA and Joint Special Operations Command, among others. One person familiar with the conversations said the concerns involved the “prevalence and pervasiveness” of detainee abuse by the National Directorate of Security, or NDS, as Afghanistan’s primary intelligence service is known. When the discussions failed to produce improved treatment and conditions, the ICRC issued confidential written findings to the Afghan government outlining the extent of the problems.